Titans of History

RICHARD III

1452–85

And thus I clothe my naked villainy

With old odd ends stolen out of holy writ,

And seem a saint when most I play the devil.

Richard III in William Shakespeare,

Richard III, Act 1, scene 3

Richard III was the hunchbacked usurper whose infamous murder of his own two nephews, one of them the rightful king of England, brought about his own destruction. Since he lost his throne to the Tudors, it was they who wrote the history of Richard III to assert the claim of their own dynasty, probably exaggerating his pitiless ambition and physical deformities.

Richard was the second son of Richard, 3rd duke of York, and Cecily Neville, daughter of Ralph Neville, 1st earl of Westmorland and granddaughter of John of Gaunt. An ugly child with protruding teeth, he grew up during the War of the Roses, fought between the rival dynastic houses of Lancaster and York. After the triumph of the Yorkists in March 1461, in a struggle that saw his father killed in battle, Richard’s eldest brother became King Edward IV.

From 1465 Richard was raised in the house of his cousin Richard Neville, later known as the Kingmaker, although there is no reason to believe that young Richard set his sights on the throne at this stage. He gave every sign of loyalty to his brother Edward, for which he was duly rewarded, gaining land and positions of influence. After the Lancastrians had briefly reinstated Henry VI as king in 1470, forcing the York brothers into exile in The Hague, Richard joined Edward on his campaign of 1471, in which Henry VI was deposed for a second time.

An able general and skilled administrator, Richard was entrusted with control of the north of England during Edward’s reign, and earned a reputation for fairness and justice. He acquired a string of castles in Yorkshire, Durham and Cumbria during the Yorkist campaigns, but his loyalty—shown for example in a successful campaign that Richard waged on Edward’s behalf against the Scots in 1481—meant that the king tolerated his brother’s growing influence.

In 1478, Richard may have allowed himself to dream of the crown for the first time when George, the middle York brother, was executed for treason, possibly at Richard’s behest, thus removing another potential obstacle to the throne. But it was when Edward IV died unexpectedly on April 9, 1483 that his ambitions were truly laid bare. Next in line to the throne was the twelve-year-old Edward V, followed by his nine-year-old brother, Richard of Shrewsbury, the two sons of the king’s beautiful wife, Elizabeth Woodville. As the lord protector of the late king’s will, Richard swore allegiance to his young nephew, but less than a month later he seized first Edward, then his younger brother, and imprisoned them both in the Tower of London.

Richard initially claimed he had seized the two boys for their own protection, and, on specious charges of treason, ordered the execution of those previously entrusted with their care. Just two months later, however, he had an announcement made outside St. Paul’s Cathedral declaring Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville illegitimate since, according to the testimony of an unnamed bishop, Edward was already secretly married at the time to his mistress, Lady Eleanor Butler. Richard forced an act through Parliament to annul the marriage posthumously, simultaneously bastardizing his nephews and clearing his own way to the throne. After quashing a brief uprising against him, he was crowned Richard III at Westminster Abbey on July 6, 1483.

To secure his position, Richard seized and brutally murdered several barons who might oppose his accession. He was acutely aware, however, that, as long as they lived, his two nephews would pose a serious threat to his rule, so it must have surprised no one when, in the summer of 1483, both boys were declared missing. By autumn, it was widely assumed they were dead and nobody doubted their uncle was responsible. According to Sir Thomas More, writing some years afterward, the two boys were smothered on the king’s orders as they slept. It was not until 1647, when the skeletons of two children were discovered under a staircase in the Tower, that they were finally buried in Westminster Abbey.

That Richard had murdered the princes was accepted as true during his reign and regarded with horror even in those brutal times. For contemporary chroniclers, deformity was sign of an evil character and Richard’s actions in 1483 evoked the image of the startlingly ugly creature they described: buck teeth, excessive body hair from birth, a crooked back, withered arm and haggard face. According to one chronicler, he was tight-lipped and fidgety, “ever with his right hand pulling out of the sheath to the middle, and putting in again, the dagger which he did always wear.” Some historians believe that the chroniclers—serving as Tudor propagandists—may have exaggerated Richard’s deformities, but it says much about his reputation that it is the nervy and sinister hunchback portrayed in William Shakespeare’s Richard III that subsequent generations have come to know, “so lamely and unfashionable/That dogs bark at me as I halt by them.”

His chief Lancastrian rival, Henry Tudor—who later launched an organized campaign to blacken Richard’s name and present him as a monster—collected an army on the continent and invaded England in a campaign that reached a climax at the Battle of Bosworth Field on August 22, 1485. The turning point of the encounter came when Henry Percy, the earl of Northumberland, refused to throw his reserves into the battle, while Richard’s ostensible allies, Thomas Stanley, afterward the earl of Derby, and his brother, Sir William—who had been waiting to see which way the battle turned—intervened on the side of Henry. Though Richard continued to fight on bravely, hacking his way through the opposing army and very nearly reaching Henry himself, he was eventually encircled and killed by the poleaxe of a Welshman. The last Plantagenet king of England, Richard had reigned for just two years. Henry Tudor became Henry VII, his dynasty ruling until the death of Elizabeth I in 1603.